Making marks permanent

A mark you draw stays a mark: movable, recolourable, removable, and listed. Making the marks permanent produces a copy where that is no longer true. Nobody can pick up your highlight and drag it off the sentence.

It never writes in place. You always get a new file, and the editable original stays untouched. You cannot undo this once it is done, so keep the original.

Two different commands


Make Marks Permanent…	fixes every mark into the page. A declared black-out among them is carried out, not painted: what it covers is removed from the file.
Black Out Permanently…	removes what the declared black-outs cover, from the drawing commands and from the pictures, and nothing else. Every other mark stays a mark. A log of what was removed can be written beside the copy, off by default and switched on in Settings.

Both remove what the black-outs cover. They differ in what happens to the other marks, and in the log. See Blacking out.

Make Marks Permanent… is under File ▸ Document; Black Out Permanently… is under Legal. Each opens a save panel and writes a new file. Both act on the document in the pane you are working in.

What happens to the marks

Every page is drawn, content and annotations together, into a new PDF page. That page has no annotation list of its own to carry the marks forward in, so the marks are visible in every reader and selectable in none. The page's text stays text: redrawing keeps it as text rather than turning it into a picture.

Bookmarks, attachments, page labels, named destinations and the rest of the document's furniture are carried across. Two things are not, because they live inside the page content that is redrawn: layers, and the tree that maps content to its structure elements.

When it refuses

It refuses rather than producing a misleading file, and when it refuses nothing is written:

A black-out that cannot be carried out in full. If a page's black-out cannot be filtered out honestly, the page comes back with a black rectangle burnt over content still in the file. The copy would look redacted without being redacted.
A document that still needs a password on disk, whatever is unlocked on screen. The copy comes out blank. Open it, give the password, save it unprotected, and try again.
Writing over the original. This is never allowed, for the reason given above.

Restricting copying and editing

The copy can be made to refuse copying and editing in readers that honour that. It stops readers that honour the restriction; readers that do not honour it are not stopped. See Protection for how far that protection goes. Printing stays allowed: a copy that cannot be printed cannot be filed.

Getting back to an unprotected copy takes your password, through Legal ▸ Remove the Protection…. It writes an unprotected copy beside the protected one, and leaves the protected copy as it is. A copy protected without a password of your choosing cannot be unlocked at all: make it again from the original. This is why the original is never touched.

Watch: a short video for this page is still to come.

Contents